


Phantom Limb Pain: a fugue

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance, Season 1, Sleepless night, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 08:32:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17804624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It is two in the morning, he cannot sleep, and for reasons he cannot fathom, Jed is missing Eliza.(Compliments of MercuryGray)





	Phantom Limb Pain: a fugue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercuryGray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/gifts).



Jed threw the covers back, kicked away the sheets. He’d woken nearly an hour earlier, the stale bedclothes tangled around him and had struggled, despite the fatigue of the long day, another endless day in a row of endless days, to fall back to sleep. He’d been cold at first, his nightshirt damp with sweat; a nightmare he could not recall might have made him stir or he would soon be racked with chills and catarrh. After an hour’s worth of rearranging the sheets, beating the worn pillow, he was too warm and the moonlight seemed too bright for him to ever doze off again. He was uneasy, wanting—but he couldn’t say what it was that he needed, what troubled him. 

It wasn’t the needle, there was that. The longing was familiar but banked, stoked no higher than it ever was, a constant murmuring he’d learned to ignore. Most of the time. It wasn’t any other hunger—for food or for a woman. The dinner had been tasteless, the mutton boiled, the potatoes mealy, with nothing but water to wash it down, but the officers’ portions were ample, satisfying the belly if not the mouth. And though Nurse Mary was just as darkly, vulnerably lovely as she was difficult, he did not lust for her, not tonight. So many other nights, he might have woken from a dream of her, of the two of them together in a situation fantastical, some exotic isle where she beckoned from a villa wearing frangipani in her loose chestnut hair and nothing else, or homely, his arms around her as she kneaded dough rich with yeast and spices, a dash on flour on her cheeks, daubed on his beard when he kissed her, making her laugh in exasperated pleasure. Tonight, any hope of her seemed remote. Any wish for her was so foolish he could not hold it even in his heart.

A cloud passed in front of the moon. He shivered. His head had begun to ache, the pain behind his eyes and across his cheeks, throbbing with his heart; the weather was changing, there might be a storm before daybreak. He was as reliable as a weathervane, Eliza had always said and he found he missed her. Eliza. She would soak her handkerchief in cologne and lay it across his brow or massage his temples, the corded muscle of his neck, with gentle hands. She’d have a tisane prepared or pour the steaming water herself over the packet of herbs she’d gotten from her maid, her maid from parts unknown; the drink tasted of green, of the earthiness of roots barely washed clean, the sweetness of licorice mixed with a faint bitter bite. It soothed him to swallow, having the cup held to his lips, to hear Eliza’s voice coax him “a little more, there now, darling,” soft and honeyed as she’d always been when he first courted her. Eliza, who had left him months ago and now it seemed, not at all.

He struggled to remember her. Her blonde hair, brushed out every night a hundred strokes, her lacy peignoir falling from her white shoulders, the sound of silk moving over silk, her back turned to him in their bed. The sharpness in her tone when she said _California, California_ and the musky scent of her perfume, the bottle he’d spilt the first night after she’d gone, fumbling with the glass stopper. Three letters he’d had and then none. And tonight, his head ached, the moonlight only a slightly smaller misery than the sun, and there was no Eliza to comfort him. No rest, as they said, for the wicked. In the morning, he’d be exhausted and all Mary would offer him was weak coffee and her quizzical expression when he was slow and irritable, when he dropped the scalpel in the basin and it clanged like the bells of Notre Dame.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Tumblr game of "give me a made-up fic title and I'll tell you the story I'd write." Well, I decided to write a little something...


End file.
